In Focus: Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington was one of the first documentary photographers with whom I actually sat down and had a conversation. I was fresh out of college, eager and naïve, and he was visiting from Liberia, where he was juggling his film and video cameras on the front lines of a devastating civil war. He spoke at length about the politics and history of the country, but also knew where to get the best chicken shawarma in Monrovia. Perhaps because of this, Hetherington’s images go beyond the chaos of conflict, capturing the human side of the situation: a young girl lingers at a wedding in the capital; two women, one with a baby strapped to her back, deliver rocket-propelled grenades and ammunition to a disarmament checkpoint. I assumed all photographers were this committed to the story.

Hetherington has walked the front lines of documentary practice as well, exploring the boundaries between still images and moving, photojournalism and conceptual work. He published “Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold” and spent the better part of 2007 in Afghanistan, documenting U.S. soldiers in the Korengal Valley; the resulting work earned both World Press Photo of the Year and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. And he’s returned to West Africa time and again, most recently to Guinea for this magazine. (Watch an audio slide show of that work.) “The media landscape is in flux, and so am I,” said Hetherington. “Who knows what the future holds.”

“I was aware that my pictures were being used to illustrate others’ ideas, so I started making stories to express my own ideas about the world,” Hetherington said. In 2003, he travelled to Liberia, a country beset by a bloody civil war, and was the only photographer to live behind rebel lines. Here a Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) fighter cleans his AK-47 in preparation for a renewed attack on the capital, Monrovia.

Photographs by Tim Hetherington/Panos

Whitney Johnson was the director of photography at The New Yorker from 2011 to 2015.